Tag: marketing

How Automation Can Supercharge Marketing For Your Online Business

  • Jason@DPD
  • June 25, 2019
  • No Comments

Online businesses have so many more opportunities to market than pre-internet brick and mortar stores. But with those opportunities come some challenges. You’re expected to show up in so many different places and have a presence in so many channels. Email marketing, new social media platforms all the time, mobile marketing, etc. 

How do you keep it all going at once without dropping the ball? Where do you find the time?

According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound report for 2019, The top marketing challenge for companies was generating leads and traffic, followed by proving the ROI of their marketing methods and obtaining the budget to pull it all off. Marketing automation tools can help you with all three. 

Automating your online marketing can help you generate more leads and grow your traffic, analyze exactly the ROI you’re getting on your marketing, and reduce your costs making it easier to hit the budget. 

What can automation do for you?

Automation allows you to leverage online tools and technology to save time and effort. You can automate communication, lead nurturing, content scheduling, research and analytics, and social media processes. All of this lets you get more done in less time, saving money while you reach more clients. Here are some examples of how you can use online marketing automation to reach more clients in less time:

Communications

When leads reach out to you online, how long does it take them to get a response? If the answer is longer than a few minutes, it could be costing you new customers. We live in the age of impatience and a lead who is actively looking for your products and services will quickly move on to the next provider while awaiting your reply. 

You can automate emails to respond to inquiries, giving you more time to provide an answer to the question being asked. You can do similar things with social media messenger apps, like Facebook Messenger. Chatbot technology can even carry on a simple customer service or marketing conversation for you, providing leads and current customers with simple information and answers instantly.  

Lead nurturing

You can automate the nurturing process by setting an automated sequence of messages through email, messenger, or even text messages. This allows you to follow up and stay top-of-mind with your leads automatically. 

Content scheduling

If you use a lot of content to market your business on social media, it can take hours to schedule posts to different platforms at the best times of day for each. This process can be automated, allowing you to paste the content into a tool which schedules on multiple platforms at specified times throughout the day. Finally, you can handle all your social media posting at once and let it trickle out at the perfect time.  

Aiming at the Right Target

Before you think about online marketing automation tools, you have to consider what you want to achieve and the best way to go about it. A few questions up front will save you a lot of trial and error later on. 

What tasks should you automate?

You’ve got a lot on your plate. Marketing involves a lot of different steps and not all of them are prime targets for automation. You have to determine which ones take up a lot of your team’s time, without the need for human decision making and judgement. 

Repetitive tasks that your team perform in the same way, over and over again, will save the most time and give the best results if automated. The repetitive and sometimes boring nature of those tasks (let’s be honest) also creates a higher risk of mistakes. That can be prevented by automation.

What tools should you use?

Some of the top online marketing automation tools are discussed below. For now, think about the tasks you’ve just decided to focus on. Chances are there are several tools on the market to do each of them. You’re looking for the ones that fit your budget and the unique needs of your company for that task. 

Who’s in charge of those tools?

Automation tools save tons of time and effort and streamline your day to day marketing, but they do still take time to set up and master. Decide who in your organization will be using these tools and what the learning curve looks like. The makers of these automation tools want you to succeed and continue using them. Many offer free training, support, and even certification. 

Re-evaluate 

Automation tools can help you track ROI, but how do you track the ROI of the tools themselves? Before you start using a new tool, take a look at the results you’re getting and the time and energy you’re putting into that specific task. Once you’re up and running with a new automation tool, compare your new results to see if the tool is helping you improve your outcome. 

Top Marketing Automation Tools

Hubspot

Hubspot offers a range of automation tools in its marketing suite, depending on the level you purchase. You can manage and segment your email list, build automated email campaigns, and connect everything to the built in CRM. 

Pardot 

For a product with a bit more of a sale process, Pardot can be a great option. It automates and streamlines the sales process, allowing you to track, nurture, and score leads. It also makes it easy to track ROI for your campaigns. All of this connects with your SalesForce CRM, since Pardot is made by SalesForce. 

Hootesuite

For social media marketing, Hootesuite offers pretty much everything you need. You can schedule all your social media posts in one place at one time. 

Hootesuite will alert you when your company or product is mentioned on social, so you can make the most of free publicity or put out any fires before they spread. You can also keep a close eye on the analytics of all your social media content. 

A few new automation tools likely hit the market while you were reading this article. Take a look at what’s out there and see how automation can help you make the most of your day to day marketing efforts.

New Feature: Marketing Opt-In for GDPR Compliance

  • Jason@DPD
  • May 24, 2018
  • 5 Comments

This post has been updated on May 31 to address vendor feedback changes.

In addition to our previous policy changes for GDPR, this morning we’ve released a new “marketing opt-in” feature that displays a checkbox on the cart during checkout. If checkout is completed with this box unchecked, your buyer will not be sent to marketing integrations configured on your store.

Continue reading New Feature: Marketing Opt-In for GDPR Compliance

Making Great eBook Covers on a Budget

  • Jason@DPD
  • February 23, 2018
  • 1 Comment

One of the biggest things you can do to improve sales and give a professional appearance to your information products is have a great cover / product photo for your downloadable product. In the case of ebooks or PDFs, this means you need a cover you can use on your website, on your product in DPD to be shown in the cart and customer portal, and when marketing your product. In this post we’ll go over some options for creating covers and show you a simple workflow to create your own.

Continue reading Making Great eBook Covers on a Budget

Alternatives to using Coupons

  • Jason@DPD
  • August 13, 2013
  • No Comments

We came across an interesting article today titled The Coupon Code is a Slap In the Face that was decidedly anti-coupon code.

From the article:

You want to pay for this product or service. You were prepared to pay the advertised price; now you know there is (or has been) a magical passcode that could get you a lower price. You fire up Google, and search: “product name, coupon code.” You get pages of results: mostly garbage, some scams, and a few legitimate coupon sites. Unfortunately, the codes listed on those sites are a year old: you missed your chance.

Why do web apps and retailers do this to their paying customers? At the moment you’re actually ready to buy something you get a slap in the face: ”You’re paying full price, but if you had our magic code you wouldn’t have to.”

We’re Not Anti-Coupon if Thats What You’re In To

Hey, we don’t judge! Coupon codes are valuable promotional tools for some vendors. DPD supports coupon codes with some powerful targeting controls like dates they’re active, specific products required for them to be used, item and cart total requirements, and more.

However, we understand and appreciate the school of thought that coupon codes are in fact bad customer service, so we wanted to share with you some alternatives to using coupon codes for promotions.

The Coupon Field Can be Disabled

First off, if you don’t use coupons and don’t want users stopping checkout to go Google around and try to find a coupon code because they see a coupon field in your cart you can turn it off.

1. Log in to DPD
2. For the store you want to disable coupons for, go to Theme in the left menu
3. Edit your current theme and select the “Cart” page options
4. Uncheck the box to display the coupon field and save.

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That’s it! Remember though, if you decide to offer a coupon in the future you’ll need to go back to your theme and re-enable the field.

Alternate Price Points

As suggested in the article:

[Or] instead of coupon codes, they should have separate referrer URLs for people with the code so you don’t feel like the loser who didn’t get invited to the party.

DPD is set up to support alternate price points, and any product in DPD can have an unlimited number of alternate price points without using additional product slots.

Price Points are just what they sound like: different prices you charge for the same product. For example, you might sell your eBook for a regular price of $20.00. Instead of giving a 25% off coupon out, you could create an alternate price point of $15.00 and put it on your special offer landing page. People who buy from the $20 and the $15 price point are buying the same thing, they’re just paying different prices just like with a coupon. They’ll both go through the same checkout and get the same product with the same flow, no coupon required.

You can create a special landing page on your website for a promotion. Then, generate your DPD buy button using a special price point and place it on your landing page. Everyone who buys through that button will get the special price point it was created for.

You can use price points in other ways too. One of the most popular uses for alternate price points is for special offers to your email subscribers. You don’t even need to create a special landing page. Send a newsletter with a HTML or text link to the special price point and your subscribers can start checkout at the special price directly from the email.

Another popular marketing strategy is to make “Special Offers” to marketing related forums. You can easily generate a bbcode button and insert an alternate price point button in to a special offer post on a forum (we even provide pre-formatted BBCode!), paste the link in to a tweet or Facebook post.. just about anywhere you can paste a link you can post a special offer price point.

To create an Alternate Price Point:

1. Log in to DPD
2. Go to Products in the left menu
3. Find the product you want to create the price point for in the list and click it’s Details link
4. On the product detail page, find the price points section and click the “Create new Price Point” link

Add Price Points

5. Set your special price and name for this price point. The alternate price point name will be shown instead of the product name in the cart. This is great for if you want to title it “My Product – List Special Offer!” or similar to customize it further.

Two Price Points Listed

That’s it. You can now generate an “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button using the special price point:

Generate buttons using alternate price points

Here is an example of that special price point created above:

Add to Cart

Alternate price points are especially suited to limited time promotions because of their behavior when a price point is deleted. When a customer tries to buy using a special price that no longer exists, DPD will automatically revert them to the default product price. This means that when you’re done offering the special price you can safely just delete it–Even if the special price point link exists out there on the internet, people who try to buy from it after the promotion has ended will be offered the product at the regular default price.

Money Saving Bundles / Combos

New Bundle Menu OptionIn DPD bundle products are made up of other products. The great thing about bundles for promotion is that they can have their own price that is completely unrelated to the price of the products in the bundle.

For example, lets say you sell a program for $49.99 and two add-on themes for $19.99 each. The price of these together is $89.97. You could create a coupon that looks for that specific price and the base program before applying a discount, or you could just create a money saving bundle at a special price.

An example promotion might be “Buy the program and two themes for $67.50 and save 25%!” where you would create a bundle that contains all three products and set the price at $67.50.

Just like any other product in DPD, you can always create additional price points as outlined above for bundled products.

To create a bundle is easy: Just go to “New Bundle” in the left menu.

Or Just Lower Your Product’s Price for a While

If all this is a bit complicated you can just lower the price of your product in DPD. Edit your product, set the price lower, and save. When you’re ready to charge more, raise the price again.

Unlike PayPal buttons and other systems, With DPD you don’t have to regenerate the button code when you change the price–the buttons link to the product in DPD so whatever the current price is when the customer clicks it is what we’ll charge.

Want to sell for $10 for a few weeks instead of $20? Go ahead. You don’t need to update your website code. Ready to switch back? No problem; just log in to DPD and raise the price of the product. Everything will update automatically.

The Bottom Line

DPD supports coupons. We understand lots of people love to offer coupons, and we recognize their value to merchants who use our system.

We also understand that some people just hate them, so we’ve done our best to give you the most flexible promotion platform we can we alternate price points, bundles, and seamless price updates.